


be yourself, by yourself (stay away from me)

by cashtastrophe



Series: embarassing ancient teenage bandom fic [1]
Category: Bandom, My Chemical Romance, The Used
Genre: Bad BDSM Etiquette, M/M, Not Safe Sane and Consensual, Rape Aftermath
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-13
Updated: 2015-04-13
Packaged: 2018-03-22 15:05:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3733342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cashtastrophe/pseuds/cashtastrophe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And if you weren’t so thrown by the fact that he just owns this, never mind the fact that it was in his damn bunk, the look on his face might be funny because here he is, slack-jawed and grasping for words, trying to force that beautiful voice to explain away dependence.</p><p> </p><p>“It...it’s not...”</p><p> </p><p>It’s not working, you want to say but you can’t bear to see his face fall again so you just drop the CD to the ground in front of him and scowl when he snatches it up.</p><p> </p><p>You don’t step on it.</p><p> </p><p>You don’t grind it into a thousand pieces with the heel of your sneaker.</p><p> </p><p>You really fucking want to.</p><p> </p><p>(in which Gerard is not over Bert and Frank is done)</p>
            </blockquote>





	be yourself, by yourself (stay away from me)

**Author's Note:**

> this is so fucking old, i'm literally just sticking it here for possible future editing someday--for real, this baby's from like 2006, unbeta'd and wildly out of date in bandom. but i have apparently been running non-con trash parties for nearly a decade so that's a fun fact about my brain
> 
> no real editing, except removal of some of my problematic teenage opinions
> 
> hope someone enjoys
> 
> (english is not my first language so if my errors bug ya, let me know because they'd bug me)

“Gerard. Gerard, what the _fuck_ is this?”

 

He glances up wide-eyed. You’re not fooled. You know pretended innocence when you see it and this? This is _it_ , his automatic smile and the way his fingers go white-knuckled around his pencil. 

 

It’s not innocuous with the case opened, bright neon pink and little black letters, but you might not have noticed it if it hadn’t been poking out from under his pillow. And honestly, you weren’t prying, you just saw that horrible creature on the cover and—well, hey. You were curious. You had a right to be.

 

And if you weren’t so thrown by the fact that he just _owned_ this, never mind the fact that it was in his damn bunk, the look on his face might be funny because here he is, slack-jawed and grasping for words, trying to force that beautiful voice to explain away dependence.

 

“It...it’s not...”

 

_It’s not working_ , you want to say but you can’t bear to see his face fall again so you just drop the CD to the ground in front of him and scowl when he snatches it up.

 

You don’t step on it.

 

You don’t grind it into a thousand pieces with the heel of your sneaker.

 

You really fucking want to.

 

 

 

*

 

 

 

He’s terrible tonight, worse than he’s been in months. You wonder if he knows it’s bad weather for long sleeves because even in the shitty hotel lighting you can see the lines down his arms, scored deep and red where he scratched like he was panicked, scratched like he was _scared_.

 

He’s still shaking like he is.

 

You know what he wants and you’ve been here before, ten times too many. He doesn’t plead because it makes him sicker and it just doesn’t work like that, does it, he wants you to take the initiative, take control, rip it still-beating from his chest while he squirms and moans and begs you to stop when he really means to beg for more.

 

You do it tonight, you pin his hips down with yours and you bind his hands above his head and you press inkstained fingers hard into his jugular until you know it’s gonna bruise and you whisper in his ear, you whisper things like _whore_ and _failure_ and _spread your legs for me, spread ‘em or I’ll make it hurt._

 

Your voice scares you. 

 

Your hands scare you even more, the way the push of your fingers—small and not good for much else beyond wrapping around the neck of a guitar, but now they’re wrapped around him and he’s moaning—marks his pale hips all black and blue in the washed-out morning sunlight. You can’t see it now and you’re grateful; he’ll never let you turn on a light. The most you can hope for is the white of his body stark against the scratchy hotel comforter, but at least you don’t know the marks your teeth leave until the next morning. 

 

And then he has the decency to hide them away, except you see him sometimes with a hand pressed sharp to his side and that look on his face—dazed and perfect and not happy, but so fucking _right—_ andit stings your throat when you realize your mouth’s been where his fingers are now, sharp into his skin until veins grated between your teeth and he cried out for you to _stop, oh God, Frank, please stop_.

 

You didn’t. You don’t. 

 

You know better.

 

 

*

 

 

You find words scratched into paper, stuffed deep inside his pillow—a weird mockery of the way he kept dreams when he was small, he was a superstitious kid, Mikey told you—and you’re just glad you found them now, before you came across them blistering and crimson in the tender skin of his wrist.

 

His handwriting’s shaky, spiky, so small that no one else should have been able to read it but you know him better than anyone (better than Mikey, even, because when he shed his skin and his shyness he shed Gerard too, just a little) and you see _three cheers you fooled them al_ l in the blackblackblack smudges of his eyeliner, bruised on the paper, pressed into the fiber until there was no separating them.

 

There’s irony here, but he’s the smart one, not you, and all you can do is crumple the words into a tiny ball and shove them deep down at the bottom of the trash can so nobody will ever see.

 

You get the fuckin’ metaphor. He hasn’t fooled you.

 

 

*

 

 

You hear the song two weeks later and next to you, _oh_ , his whole body goes rigid, frozen, and Ray’s paying more attention to the road than the radio. Except you reach forward to change the channel, turn it off, fuck, _something_ , and his fingers curl in your hoodie, tug. It’s not hard, he’s not stronger than you, but it stops you anyways.  He doesn’t meet your eyes

 

_mother never loved you, father touched you with the hand of god he’s gripping tighter saying you will burn in hell they say, you will burn in hell_

 

and you want to scream, want to grab him by the front of his jacket and make him tell you why, _why_ he would have let that slip because no one knew about it.  Not even Mikey, except now there was _him_ telling the whole world and no one was stupid. They’d get it, people he’d never, never meant to know, all because of, well. 

 

Because of what? Because Gerard, he’s too trusting.  He doesn’t want to believe that anyone would really mean to hurt him and even if he’s friends with everyone, he still needed someone to love him, still needed someone to snarl in his ear that he was beautiful facedown on the floor, that he had something worth wanting in the naked curve of his back and the hollows of his insecurities right there between his ribs.

 

That someone’s you now, but it wasn’t always, and you can’t understand why he’d trust anyone else with this when his own family never knew.

 

He looks so sad and small, clutching at you like he’s holding onto something more than your waist.  He won’t look at you.  He keeps his eyes trained firmly on his knees. At his most obedient, at his most desperate for you, he’s nothing like this and you think bitterly, I _can’t do this to you, I could never do this to you, not like he can._

 

_fucking liar._

 

He flinches and Ray sees, finally, in the rearview mirror, the way Gerard’s all hunched into himself. He flicks the radio off.

 

“Enough of this shit,” he snarls and you know what he really means and you want to laugh, irrationally you want to laugh and laugh until you can’t anymore, because with Gerard–

 

With Gerard, it’s _never_ enough. 

 

 

*

 

 

It’s nothing obvious. It never is. If you don’t know where to look, it’s not even there, he’s hidden it so well. No photographs, no possessions, no remnants of that tiny, bitter, furious boy Gerard had loved. He doesn’t talk about him. Bert exists only in the empty spaces in Gerard’s life now, the stories he doesn’t tell, the pictures he doesn’t display on their tiny mini-fridge, the tour he never mentions because they were joined at the hip, practically, for the entire thing.

 

It’s like that tour never happened, except for a jewel case hidden in his bunk and the way those old scars on his thigh (thick and heavy and deliberate and reading _you’re gonna burn in hell_ ) actually mean something to everyone else now. That they’re a lyric, that some fucking record company exec is going to make a down payment on a Lexus with five words that ruined Gerard’s life.

 

You hate him for that. Because you know he didn’t do it, right, you know those scars aren’t his.  You were there with Gerard’s hand–shaking and unsteady and so covered in his own blood that you flinched at red for the next week–holding the knife. 

 

You know what those words mean to Gerard, mostly.  As much as you can.

 

You know how they sounded, hissed into the pale shell of his six-year-old ear with hands bigger than his whole head inching the crisp white robes up over his shaking legs, heavy as they slide across his narrow, bird-bones chest. And even if the voice is Gerard’s now, the words aren’t, the tone isn’t his, because he never sounds like that hollow unless he’s echoing the sick teachings of a man dead ten years now.

 

Gerard keeps a picture of the headstone in his wallet to remind him, but he keeps the words on his skin to remember.

 

You hate that he shared that with someone who didn’t deserve it.

 

 

*

 

 

Mostly, you hate that no matter what you do, you’ll never be him. No matter how many times you hold Gerard’s hand when he can’t breathe, no matter how many times you fuck him rough and raw and sobbing, no matter how many times you wake up to Gerard’s tiny snores and his hair spilling across the pillow, there’s that bare fact.

 

No matter how many times he says he loves you, you’re not enough. You’re not _him_.

 

Because Gerard would never cheat on you. It’ll never be his hands on the soft curve of Gerard’s hips, never again. But it’ll be _him_ in Gerard’s head, _his_ words that Gerard mouths to himself silently, reverently, like a prayer to keep himself low and sick and worthless. 

 

No one’s gotten inside Gerard like he has. Not even you. You can’t keep yourself lodged in his skin like this. You can’t hurt him like he needs, and maybe, maybe it’s not cheating because it’s not like you’re doing this right, anyways.

 

But Gerard, well.

 

He’ll always go back. 


End file.
